(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a working skill estimating program, and more particularly to a working skill estimating program for estimating working skills of an agent based on response records collected during a predetermined period, each response record containing information about an inquiry from a customer, a response thereto, and time spent therefor.
(2) Description of the Related Art
In an online support center, agents accept various kinds of inquiries from customers and respond to those inquiries. Their supervisor has been required to grasp the working skills of each agent for enhancing the efficiency of support center management. Concretely, for making the management more efficient, the supervisor is required to grasp the working skills of each agent and to distribute the task of responding to each customer's inquiry to an appropriate agent, taking his or her working skills into consideration. The supervisor should also train each agent properly according to his or her current working skills so that he or she will be able to provide better customer service.
Conventionally, the working skills of an agent have been estimated on the basis of the average number of cases he or she can process per unit time. Each agent ordinarily has tasks of two sorts, responding to inquiries asked by customers through phone or the like and registering its record in a database provided in a support center. Under these conditions, the supervisor obtains an incoming time and an end time of each phone conversation, a time when a response record (referred to as an incident) is opened for registering the incident in the database, a time when the registration is ended and the incident is closed, and so forth, for calculating a time taken in responding to each customer. Based on the calculated time, the supervisor estimates the working skill levels of each agent in light of the knowledge that skillful agents respond more quickly than unskilled agents.
As another method of estimating the working skills of an agent, the following method has been proposed: Every agent is supposed to write a particular file in the course of each customer support activity. Agent terminals are linked to an administration server on the network, and each time an agent writes some data to the special file, the supervisor server is notified of the amount of write data. The resulting collection of records permits the supervisor server to evaluate the skills of each agent, based on the frequency of file access and the amount of write data. (For example, refer to the paragraph numbers [0016] to [0045] and FIG. 1 in the Official Gazette of Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2004-164344.)
However, the conventional working skill estimation involves the shortcoming of having difficulty in grasping the proper working skills of each agent because the variety of apparent working skills of each agent occurs according to a variety of inquiries.
Conventionally, the customer responding time has been estimated on the basis of the incidents registered about the ordinary tasks. In the ordinary tasks, the inquiries are varied by various factors. For example, as to an inquiry about a computer virus, as the damages caused by the computer virus have spread in society, more inquiries are asked. However, when the measures for the computer virus are completed in most computers, the inquiries thereabout are abruptly decreased. Further, in a case that a defect on hardware or a security hole on software is found, until some later date after it was made public, more inquiries are asked. However, several weeks later, for example, the inquiries are decreased. On the other hand, the inquiries for requesting the catalogues and handling the products are kept substantially constant in number.
As mentioned above, the change of the customer responding time results from the change of the agent's working skills or the change of the difficulty in responding to each inquiry. It is thus difficult to clearly distinguish the cause of the change of the responding time. The time of responding to the customers' inquiries characterized to frequently take place during some days (or weeks or months) but to be stopped some days later does not substantially depend upon the working skills of each agent. Further, if each agent is trained about these kinds of inquiries, the training is not so effective because those inquiries are likely to be decreased as days are going. Hence, those kinds of inquiries are not proper to estimating the working skills of each agent. Hereafter, those transient kinds of inquiries are called a disturbance. Conventionally, for removing such disturbances, for example, a supervisor has made sure of an incident, separated the incident if it is determined to be a disturbance from the other incidents, and estimated the working skills of each agent based on the remaining incidents. However, the determination as to whether or not the incident is the disturbance is burdensome to the supervisor. Further, it is difficult to intuitively determine if the incident is the disturbance. This means the disturbances may not be properly separated.
Further, the method of estimating the results according to the amount of data when writing the data in a file is proper to the case in which an agent repeats writing of the same file. However, this method is not proper to estimating the working skills of the agent who responds to the customers' inquiries whose contents are largely changed.